History

"I'd like to know why S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the Tesseract to make weapons of mass destruction.""Because of him.""Me?""Last year, Earth had a visitor from another planet who had a grudge-match that leveled a small town. We learned that not only are we not alone, we were hopelessly, hilariously, outgunned."

Phase 2 was to have dealt with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s creation of Tesseract-powered weapons for the defense of Earth from alien threats. To this end, Nick Fury ordered all of the weapons confiscated from HYDRA to be collected and studied by S.H.I.E.L.D.